A catheter, which is a kind of medical tubes, is widely used as a general name of tube-shaped instruments. There are catheters comprised of various materials and having various sizes and shapes for the usages. Such catheters may be used to extract retained substances in a body cavity or in various organs, absorb cleansing perfusate, measure the status of cardiac blood flow or central venous pressure, inject medicines or contrast media into a body, etc.
A Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy (PEG) tube, which is a kind of catheter, is a soft silicon tube designed to be inserted into the stomach through the abdomen and has an open port at the end thereof so that food can be injected. Further, as shown in FIG. 1, a fixture is combined with a PEG tube and guides the PEG tube in close contact with the skin of a patient.
After injecting medicine or food into a body through catheters including a gastrostomy tube, it is required to prevent backflow of the medicine or food through the catheters. To this end, a method of closing an end of a catheter protruding out of the body of a patient has been generally used to prevent backflow of medicine or food to the outside.
However, medicine or food may flow back to a closed end of a catheter, and in this case, there is a concern that food or medicine flows or is even ejected from the port at an end of the catheter, which should be protected from outside infection. In this case, it is difficult to expect actual effect in cleansing the port and the inside of the catheter by a manager (user) after injecting medicine, so prevention of backflow of food and medicine is required in terms of management and sanitation.
In the related art, as in FIG. 1, a catheter is maintained perpendicular to the body of a patient to inject food or medicine, and then it is bent at a right angle in any direction and then attached to the body of the patient by an adhesive band etc. to be stowed. In order to inject food or medicine again, the adhesive band is detached and then food or medicine is injected and catheters are managed in this way.
As described above, it is inconvenient to use catheters in the related art and it is dangerous in terms of sanitation to repeatedly attach and detach adhesive bands etc. to and from the skin, which is vulnerable to outside inspection of a patient. Further, a catheter attached to the body of a patient may be separated from the body of the patient when an adhesive band is detached.
In particular, the stomach wall and the inner fixture (not shown) of a catheter are usually slightly spaced from each other to prevent pressure that may be applied to the stomach wall, but when an adhesive such as an adhesive band is used, the danger that the catheter and the inner fixture are vertically pulled and press the stomach wall due to carelessness is increased.